It is well known to use belt transports in document processing machines, such as inserting machines. Generally, the belt transports include belts moving about a driven pulley system. Some belt transports include upper and lower belts which are positioned to frictionally feed sheets therebetween. Such upper and lower belt transports have been used in collating machines that receive documents from an upstream feeding device and accumulate the documents in a stacking area to form a collation.
Examples of such collating machines are disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,805,841 and 4,640,506 which disclose collators having the capability to collate in standard or reverse order. Collating machines are also disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,799,663, 4,925,180, 4,925,362 and 5,178,379. The collating machines disclosed in the aforementioned patents use an upper and lower belt and pulley configuration to convey sheets into and collations out of the collating machine. Stop registration wheels are used to stop the forward progress of the sheets being accumulated to form the collation. The stop/registration wheels are wheels which have a section cut out to provide a flat vertical surface which abuts a flat horizontal surface for stopping and aligning the leading edge of the sheets to form a collation.
When problems, such as paper jams, occur in the foregoing collating machines, removal of the collation from the stacking area requires pulling the collation from between the upper and lower belts. Typically, the elasticity of the belts is such that for small collations such removal usually does not damage the sheets of the collation. However, removal of large collations usually results in damage to one or more sheets of the collation.
It is an object of the present invention to provide an alternate way of removing collations from the stacking area of a collating machine that uses a belt transport.